


dead ends, these unfinished worlds

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, the summary says it all folks, this is...some ways they might have died, tw: death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-07 20:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7728505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“....I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.” </p><p>― Michael Cunningham, The Hours</p>
            </blockquote>





	dead ends, these unfinished worlds

**Author's Note:**

> This is the major character death fic(s?) your mother warned you about. But hopefully in a new and different and not totally devastating way. Don't hate me.

“I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. **_I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died._** ”  
― Michael Cunningham, _The Hours_

 

“We bury our dead alive, don’t we?”  
— The X-Files, 3x15

 

* * *

 

 _one_  
(1961 - 1992)  
(1964 - 1997)

Blood on dry grass has a particular color. The play of light makes it look movie-magic red and unreal. They killed him in Idaho, before he even really had a chance to do anything worth dying for.  

This is too personal, she thinks when she finds him. It is too intimate for me to stand here against the white sky with his blood on my hands. She looks at him with her fingers clasped white-knuckled between her knees, elbows straight like she is trying to crack something open and spill its warmth. She does not cry. Her lip bleeds and it feels small.

They ask her to speak at the funeral and she politely declines. In the back of the crowd, ground open, she thinks she does - did - not know him, does not have anything to say.  It does not occur to her until years later that somewhere between facing blank landscapes out a car window and finding herself eye level with his bloodied chest, she had lost the capacity to put meaning into words.

Years later. By that time she’s already found that action supplants speech. She is quiet and effective in the basement office, and it is neater than he’d left it. She replaces his silly poster (a blurry diner-bought photo and white walls) and almost everything else. She does not live in his shadow but rather his wake, like momentarily flattened waves behind a boat moving too quick to catch the current. She lets his absence gape and then rocks forward in the force of it. She scrubs the tables and walls and leaves his glasses in the right-hand drawer.

The blonde haired teenager had put his arm around her at the Idaho hospital, smelling of salt and smoke. Said: Hope he at least found what he was looking for.

He didn’t, she’d said back without opening her eyes. And was surprised to find she’d meant: Fuck you. Surprised to hear the truth in it. In the Idaho hospital, for a moment, she’d fallen into the dancing emergency room lights against the black sky of her eyelids. And thought, not for the first time, incredible.

He’d once pointed up and showed her where to look. She tracks the bullet in his chest to the gun of a military officer, to the deep vein of Ellen’s Airbase and she is a doctor still, somehow, and she is very good, and so she follows the vein to its artery, to its throbbing, crooked, cancerous heart. And then she puts a bullet in it. He’d once shown her where to look. She is still following his hand.

She dies bruised and pale and ugly and somehow sacrilegiously martyred. She flirts with wealthy men and straight-laced women, kisses a few. Fucks more. There is a blank, three-month hole in her life in which a lead following an ephemeral abductee had resulted in her own invisibility. They had stopped looking. No one believes her when she insists it was abduction. It all just happened too fast, her mother had said. Well. The cancer kills her slow.

Her sister cries at her funeral, which is not at Arlington. She’d worked hard, bled. She’d pierced the ink-vein of some milky black conspiracy, and what she’d earned was not worth carving into marble. She’d pointed fingers at the men that killed him, her partner, whose smile she can’t picture and whose hands were too big for the steering wheel, years ago, and Skinner cocked his head and said: This is ridiculous and, What about your reputation and, You hardly knew him.  She never could remember what he, her transitory partner, had looked like in candlelight or the rain. But, God, it was so intimate to be left there with the open sky. With his blood on her hands.

She had not spoken at his funeral. Had not had anything to say.

 

 _two_  
(1964 - 1998)  
  (1961 - 1998)  

Utah is wide and rising, like a place with something to prove. She calls him from an apartment that reminds her, oddly, of willow trees. Of the easy thin ripple of empty branches in slicing air. It’s cold and when she walks through the doorway she steps slightly to the side. It's instinct, to let him in after her. There is a gasp of cold air and nothing else when she locks the door. A gasp of air, and now she’s thinking of the way he’d kissed her before she'd left.

There was talk of a cougar at the airport, mauled a man outside the city limit. She tells him about it from her kitchen floor, talks calm and neat like she’s sitting at a desk or a table and not on slick tile. Her palm is flat against the white chill of it, like it is searching for solid ground.  

Don’t tell me you want to come home, he’d told her, with his lips where her neck sweeps gently into her shoulder. His hallway had bled into his bedroom, had bled into the sheets and the softness in his hands. I can’t do this if you tell me you miss home. Promise.

I promise, she’d said. I promise.

On the phone he says: Scully, it’s boring here without you. Sighs. We don’t even have any fucking mountain lions.

He talks like he hasn’t kissed her with that mouth.

Her willow-tree apartment echoes the shudder of her shoulders. She smiles into the phone and hopes that is enough. Closes her eyes and leans against her thin white cabinets, feels the wood learn her weight. She jerks herself back into straight-spined silence. She does not like the idea of anything in this apartment becoming accustomed to her, of leaning into the white cabinets like she'd leaned into the spread of his hands. 

Hey, he says when her breathing goes the shallow-slow of the faux-sleeping. Think they got any foxes out there?

She laughs and he can tell it takes something out of her to do it. Like she’s forced it from the hard edges of her ribs. Oh, she says. I don’t think so. Not very many at all.

It takes three months to make her a liar. (Don’t tell me you want to come home. I promise, promise.)  He is pretending to not listen to her pretend to not cry over the gentle hum of landline static. She whispers it and he turns off the light in his living room, like a hundred watts is too much pretend daylight for this kind of understanding. She wants to come home and she never does.

Never does. There is a kidnapping case and a serial killer and no one connects the dots before her, no one sees the pieces. She tells him about it on a Sunday night, talking fast and blurred on the phone. She’s got the guy and he knows she has him. He can hear her clicking the safety on and off her gun and when he hangs up he tells her to be safe. I promise, she says. I promise is almost the last thing she says to him and that would have been almost beautiful in its circuitous nature. Almost. 

But because they are accustomed to a characteristic lack of grace, she calls one more time, two-nights later, and her voice is blunt and old razor dull. They have not caught him. She cannot sleep. I’m so tired, she says. They don't talk for hours. After three, he tells her to close her eyes, because he never does. And she says, yeah, I’m going to. The dial tone is loud in the sudden absence of her voice. That's it, the last thing. She hangs up without saying goodbye. 

There is a dial tone and there are miles between Arlington and Utah.  There is a man and she knew him, knew his face from line-ups and months of searching. There is a man and she'd clicked the safety on and off her gun and left it off. She'd been looking; he finds her first. There is no one to put together the pieces, no voicemail or empty trunks. Just blood on her kitchen floor. Blood in the willow-tree apartment. There are no star-stunned skies to search. The killer is caught almost immediately; she was the lead investigator but not the only one. The man kills her for very little and she dies for nothing. Utah is wide and rising and swallows her up whole.

At the funeral, he sits patiently with his hands on his knees and waits for the miracle she always quietly assured him was possible. He'd seen cancer crawl backwards from under the skin of her eyes. Seen a boy with bleeding palms. She'd said: God's hand can create miracles and held her fingers over her cross. He'd never believed in anything so much as the surety of her hands. 

Two months later, when a silly case in California ends with an unexpected dirty bomb, he is still waiting. For two months, he did everything dead-eyed and without back-up and while waiting for Scully to somehow prove her own science wrong. He was not trying to die but he had not tried to live. The autopsy reported cited fourteen stab wounds, one severing the gold chain on her neck. There was blood on her cross, but the shine came through. Miracles, she'd once told him, are beyond us, Mulder. They defy explanation. He'd nodded then, thinking of a miracle beyond. Of a white-hot thing too hot to touch.

He dies, surprised and mildly relieved, before either of them can break any more promises. They say, if she'd been there, his partner, she'd have seen it coming. Could have saved him. They have no idea what they're saying. There is no one there to argue or agree. 

You’ve never seen a mountain-lion, Mulder, she’d said on the phone that first night. How do you even know they’re real?

I don’t, he should have said. I don’t know anything anymore. 

Utah rose and kept rising. Utah swallowed them whole.

 _three_  
(1961- 1999)  
(1964 - 1999)  
(???? - 1999)

The media loves a good tragedy. A sharp, poignant, Romeo and Juliet arc. This is not how she’d planned to tell her brother about her relationship with her partner. To tell her mother she was pregnant.

But, _Two FBI Agents Killed In Freak Car Accident After Audit_ doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as _Semi-truck Kills Newlyweds and Their Unborn Child On Way Back From Oregon Trip_. Now that one’s a feature-film contender. The final scene a slow-motion, violin affair. Only much deeper into the story: We’re learning now that they both worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Heartbreak Hotel is what the caption under blurry shots of the Bellefleur motel where they last stayed will read. Or maybe, Final Resting Place.

On some of the knock-off networks, they’ll predict the accident was no accident. CNN can’t decide whether murder is more enticing than a mistake. Online chat boards light up with theories.

When the anchors fully, to the extent paid heads can, comprehend the situation, the fact that they were partners will unlock just a hint of scandal, like the brusque remnants of a pedestrian’s vintage perfume. They will call Skinner from the studio, to discuss the ins and outs of an interoffice relationship. No, he will say, it is not condoned. No, I didn’t know. I never saw it coming.

Goodness, the more dramatic anchors will say, those two were asking for trouble. But isn’t it so horrible about that baby?

“Yes,” says a dirty blonde woman, elbows pointed against the sticky diner counter. The regulars are used to her one-sided, sporadic tv conversations. The man to her left is not a regular. He looks up in surprise, then ducks his head.

The waitress tries to push one more coffee on him, tells him he looks half-dead. He gives her a tight smile, orders cherry pie in a cardboard box and twists the ring on his left hand.

“Terrible, terrible,” the blonde is muttering. The waitress throws her quietest customer a sympathetic smile.

“We can turn off the TV, sir. If she’s bothering you.”

He shakes his head. “That’s alright.” He would like to go home to his wife. They’ve stopped showing pictures at this point in the media circus, of the dead woman and her partner. Everyone has seen them though, everyone remembers. The networks tease glimpses of the carnage. At any moment they could flare up, flash a glance at the gore. At the blood on the woman’s cheek and her body half across his lap. The knowledge that the networks have, but do not disclose, not before midnight, these photos, leaves him with an acrid taste against his teeth. They talk about the torrid, tragic love affair. Still, the promise of violence hangs.

As he leaves, cherry pie in hand, he can hear the blonde woman behind him, adding her thoughts to the teleprompter speech. “I don’t think they did a bad thing,” she says. “I don’t think so. The FBI don’t make the rules about love and all that.” She shifts on the stool and it makes a tired, sighing sound. “Oh hell. Can we turn this off?”

 

His wife is not asleep when he gets home. The TV is on. The low, warm drone of canned laughter and the soft light of a bedside lamp. She is not asleep and he knows it. He makes a display of exaggerated caution, shrugging his coat off with dramatic, slow-motion silence. She opens one blue eye over her shoulder from the bed and grins, blonde hair falling over her eyes. He does not mean to grin back, was feeling cold and sorry for himself on the walk back from the diner. The rain in Washington state will do that, ruin a cherry pie and drench someone in trite melancholy. But his wife smiles, and her hair falls into her eyes and she reaches out a hand to him and it feels like morning.

“That smile wasn’t for you,” she says. “That was for the pie.”

“Oh, really?” He keeps the box behind his back. Evades her upturned palms, expectant and pale.

“Really, really.”

“It’s cherry with a side of rainwater.”

She claps in faux-elation. “My favorite.”

“I know I am.”

She rolls her eyes like she just can’t believe him and it makes something beat off rhythm in his chest. He presents her the box with flourish.

“I love you,” she says, her voice thin and feather-light, like she knows she’d made him think about it for a moment. With her sighs and her unbelieving stare. “I really, really do.” She looks up at him with a smile, wolf teeth in the half light. Clarifies: “Also to the pie.”

“Understood. The pie loves you, too.”

She tastes like cherries when he kisses her, just barely.

“They were running the story again on TV.” This as he sits on the floral comforter by the rise of her hip.

“Local?”

“Some gossip thing. Loud reporter.” He tugs gently at a strand of her hair. “Very blonde.”  

She laughs at that. “What a trip.”

He does not laugh with her. “Yeah.”

She tilts her head at him, her fingers gently spreading over her stomach. She looks exactly the same, but softer. “It bothers you, doesn’t it? The way they talk about it.”

“No.” He looks at his hands and she follows his eyes, pulls his fingers over hers to rest low in the cradle of her hips.

“Liar,” she whispers sweetly, turning fully towards him, flat on her back like a pinned butterfly. She smiles again, her eyes lighter than they’d been when her hair was natural.

He wanted this. He chose this. This the quiet, mundane odd-jobs and the sleep-weight of her every morning. He’d picked this over everything, picked her, his blonde and brilliant wife, with her hundred kilowatt smile and gold framed glasses and dime store book of baby names. Picked her over his partner and his sister. This, the cradle in the corner and the unwavering precision of her hands.  

“It’s just graphic,” is all he says. “The photos they show on TV.”

“Mulder,” she says softly, letting her palms come to rest on either side of his face like she’s capturing a sentence he hadn’t meant to speak. “Mulder.” He hears the full-stop in her voice. That is all she had wanted to say.

“Anna,” he replies.

She scrunches up her nose in disgust. “You’re mean.”

He leans over her, careful to avoid weight on her stomach as he props himself up just far enough away that he develops a gentle myopia. Her, in focus, and then everything else. She looks acutely different and exactly the same. Tomorrow they’d have to be up early. Tomorrow they should plan to move again. The media had ripped into the story like wolves, left the inconsistencies bloodied and devoured by the public at large. But still, even dyed blonde and bearded, respectively, they looked like their Fatalistic Love Story selves. They looked like a dead man and his new wife. It had been three months since he’d asked her to die with him.

Scully,” he says, finally, truthfully. She kisses him to feel his heartbeat everywhere, under her fingers. They die on Channel 9 at midnight and then not ever again as the scandal wears off. They die for the world on screens and chat rooms. Her mother knows better. They’d died harsh in Oregon, brutal and ugly so no one would question it.

“Scully,” he says, between breathing. “Scully,” without a full-stop so he has time to say the rest of what he wants to tell her. He used to say her name sharper, a mouthful of tacks and unfinished worlds. That is not how he says it now.

They’d died harsh for the world in Oregon. She tells him she always thought they’d die together, still does. We have, he reminds her and she shakes her head.

No, not yet.

(They live gently for each other for years and years and years.)

 

 _four & five & six_  
(1961 - 1998, 2000, 2012)  
(1964 - 1998, 2000, 2012)

I’m so glad, she says at the end of it. Sometimes she thinks it, when it happens too fast for words. I’m so glad it’s happening like this. She gets to hold his hand.

Like this: in a dance of scattered gunfire, the most cliché of action hero endings. The kind her brother will best understand. Mulder is in front of and then beside her, and neither of them had thought to wear vests at the gas-station outside of a forked road in Tennessee. They were chasing a monster and hadn’t met it yet. Strike that. They were chasing a monster and had found the wrong one.

Anyways, shot straight through the chest and once through the thigh, she is a doctor. She has only ever been a doctor. She is his doctor. He’s hit between the fourth and fifth true ribs. She’s demanding a crash cart as a precaution and she doesn’t remember making it to a hospital. Doesn’t remember anything but the asphalt, actually. The asphalt and Mulder beside her. The one-two wheeze across the bullet in his chest. She is shot straight through with love for him, suddenly. Shot straight through the chest and really, truly, bleeding all over the asphalt in Tennessee.

She means to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was not only ever a doctor and sorry I am bleeding all over the asphalt in Tennessee. She starts to say I’m sorry, and it comes out as I’m glad. I’m so glad, she says, and it starts to snow.

He blinks at her, half-asleep over a sheet of white and maybe he smiles, but the light teases at her eyes now, only lets her see him in snatches. She thinks she never did ask if he owns a bed, never did get to see him in it. This is what it would be like, she decides. A Sunday morning with him. A slow-heartbeat Sunday. He is holding her hand and she doesn’t really feel it, but she’s glad. He blinks, half-smiles. She’s glad. It’s a thought: Snow in Tennessee, rudimentary flakes and total silence. It is almost impossible. It is July. She never does get to think about it, the impossible midnight snow and the warmth of the breeze that carries it. It is a slow-heartbeat Sunday in July, with Mulder beside her. It is snowing in Tennessee.

All around them, she is sure, the sky falls, cold.

Or like this: the quintessential New Year’s Eve car accident. The front wheel skids on a red carpet runway of black ice and the Oak tree off of an Alexandria back road is twisted for years to come. They were supposed to just go to Georgetown, play by some unspoken rules. Except they never made it that easy. She’d fought zombies for him and laughed it off and he held his arm against his chest, wounded soldier style. He had kissed her and she was going to kiss him again at the foot of his bed before leaving him for the night. She was thinking about it when the car hit the ice, still thinking about it when it spun off into the wrong lane and actually, no, she wasn’t thinking about it when they hit the tree. She wasn’t really thinking of anything then, except that she was glad he was with her. Glad to be kissed and not alone as the wheel spun and spun and spun.

After that, she is buried in San Diego, where her brother can smell the sea air and her mother can imagine her husband rests gently in the water surrounding his baby girl’s gravestone. His funeral is in Massachusetts, the Vineyard. It is the farthest from each other they’ve been in years.

Finally like this: he holds her as the world ends. It is warm light outside the window and they have loved each other for a very long time. Their son. She thinks about their son, far away and seeing this same warm light, and it makes him feel close somehow, like the world is being stitched and drawn together. Tightened across a hot whisper of string.

We’re together, she says.

He nods against her collar. He does not want to watch, but she has a morbid curiosity, has lived long years cutting up the dead to see what left them cold and rigid on her table. She wants to see the world sliced straight though, a textbook Y-incision to expose the rot beneath the surface. She keeps her eyes open as she presses her lips to his hair. Of course, he says. Always.

She squeezes her fingers against his, all messy and laced between them. Thinks of reed baskets and ribs to hold air, a necessary entrapment, a warm one. I’m glad, she says and watches the window as the world gasps, stunned with fire.

From this angle, through their grey curtains, the world burns and it looks like morning.

 

 _seven_  
(1961 - 2040)  
(1964 - ????)

He dies, silver in her arms. He dies in winter in a room they’d first seen in spring, decades ago, when it was wide and empty and wholly theirs. He dies and she loves, loves, loves him.

He dies. And she, broken and unbreakable and not convinced of her own human nature, she does not.

 

 _eight_  
(1964 - 1995)  
(1961- 2028)

He's thinking of _The Deer Hunter_. He’d never even seen _The Deer Hunter_. No, that was something of a lie. He’d half-seen it once, in college, but he remembers it mostly in sound. The images are muddled, muggy and humming with the singing burn of smoke and the brown crash of Phoebe’s hair. There’d been screams, the wham-bam sounds of cinema gore, as Mike wins Russian Roulette in the final round. He remembers wanting to turn it off, being put-off by the cacophony, the melodrama of it.

It is not like that when Scully dies.

He shoots her and it’s quiet. He shoots her and she crumples like a slip of paper, forced into a pocket. To be read later. To be thrown away.

Modell says, Oops.

Mulder is thinking: this is too much real life. This is not like the movie. He's thinking this, and he's catching her on her way down, pulling her tight against him. The lack of expected sound (a thud, a whimper, another bang) leaves heavy, gaping silence. It cleaves down around them like an air lock, holds on tight. She had not thought he’d do it. She’d been angry, not afraid. He absolutely, absolutely hates her for trusting him.

And he’s not thinking breathe. He’s too fucking stupid to even think breathe. He’d shot her and she’s bleeding through a perfect dime-sized hole where her collar bone arches over the kevlar. She’s bleeding right where the armor ended and she began, right where he’d wanted to kiss her.  This is blood, her blood, on his hands and her cheek that he’s touching and he’s not even thinking breathe. He’s pushing hair out of her eyes and willing her to look at him and thinking: Smile. Smile, Scully. God, please, just smile. Tell me it’s okay. Just smile.

She does not. Breathe/smile. Her mother squeezes his hand in the church and says: She would want you to live. I know, he says. And so he does.

He does not say that if she’d lived, Scully, he’d never have touched her again. Would have quit his job, moved states away to live somewhere quietly content with the knowledge that she was living somewhere quietly breathing. Let her nurse a scarred chest somewhere cool, with pine wood floors and black counters, where she didn’t have to buy two sets of every blouse she liked in case one ended the day darkened and steeped with blood.

This is his most indulgent fantasy. Even twenty years later, with his dark haired old/new wife curled up on her side against a blue pillow, he pictures Scully far away. Scully apart. Scully with some light-haired man who touches her gently, just above the collarbone, where the armor ends and she begins. Scully in white and cream blouses, unstained.

Diana says: You’re not sleeping. Where do you go?

And he says: Nowhere. I stay right here.

His second fantasy is that the revolver hadn’t made a click, click, clicking sound when they pulled her away from him and he pulled it against his ear. Click. Click. There had been kevlar between them when he held her, but he could guess at the truth in the stillness of her ribs. He’d wanted a bedside vigil, wanted Scully’s blue-eyed stare and her hatred more than her love. He’d gotten a dark wood casket, a slap on the wrist and a new/old partner with black-brown eyes. Click.

He had lived and lived. There is a daughter and he loves her. There is a wife and she is kind. For years, just after, he’d wanted to get close enough to death to taste it, to see whatever Scully had seen. To have one more fantastic experience shared between the both of them. There’d been hospitals. There’d been the new/old partner, over and over. There is the new/old wife and she tries to be kind, had always tried to be kind.

When he's older, much, it is something as mundane as cancer.

The doctor is curt and serious, explaining the prognosis, and he can’t help but think of her, Scully. Scully, who he used to know, thirty-something ago. Scully, who was always just on the cusp of revealing something, of surprising him. Scully, who he knew better in the future than he ever actually had. He was so sure of her, so sure of their encroaching plots on some sparse and accurate graph. He never knew her favorite movie. Or color. Or if she ever cried herself to sleep when her father died. When he’d read her middle name on her headstone, it had felt oddly unfamiliar. He’d been surprised to realize he always thought she was just going to lie him down and explain it all to him. All of it. The whole fucking thing. Scully who had re-written Einstein and could make him read the world and understand it, the repositioning of atoms and magnetic poles and why her brother was protective and if she liked cereal or waffles on Sundays and whether or not God was a choice or predisposition and - and does she remember, his wife, that he once had another partner?

Yes, they were close. Yes, he did kill her. No, they never did. Yes, he had wanted to. Yes, he did. Yes, he still does. Scully would have narrowed her eyes. Cancer, Mulder? Not a chance. Rolled up her sleeves to reveal yet another solution. Magic tricks and a medical miracle. It’s alright. He hugs his wife. He’s going to die for her to make this easy. He’d wanted to live for Scully and never told her.

And then, finally, almost forty-years since, he is somewhere cool. With pine wood floors and black counters. And Scully. Scully with a smile. Scully tugging his hands to her waist. Scully whose collar is rigid and smooth and who rises up on her tiptoes to touch him. Scully who says, Smile, Mulder. Somewhere cool and quiet.

Scully in a white and cream blouse.

 

* * *

  

“..But my dear, my dear  
If I now dream about your hands, your hair,  
**_it is the vividness of the dead end  
_****_I miss._ ** Like chess. Mind against mind.”

\- Louise Gluck, Dead End.


End file.
